A blog about cooking. Sometimes there will be recipes of sorts, pictures of food I've cooked, or tales of cooking mishaps and successes. I hope you enjoy reading and commenting.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Cheese-Stuffed, Bacon-Wrapped BURGERS!!

As many of you know and have probably experienced for yourselves, I've been a little obsessed with the Pinterest.com website. I simply love the fact that I can look at a huge variety of ideas on there and on other websites and organize them how I might want to use them. I have a pin-board on there called Nom Nom. This is where I pin the ideas for recipes that I want most to try or that I have tried (some of my recipes from this blog have made it there). Well, this recipe was inspired by a pin from Pinterest.com, although I had to make lots of little changes because of my time constraints etc.

Today I was running errands with my mom and we were discussing dinner as we went. We couldn't figure out what to make. Originally we thought to make a homemade mac and cheese (I really want to try a quinoa one) and some veggies, but the day was hot and we were running late and out of time. So I thought that I would try these burgers. All our ground meat at home was frozen and we didn't have buns so we made a quick stop at the grocery store (where I also got some brie cheese for my burger and some bacon for wrapping) to pick up what we needed. Here is what I used:

President's Choice Prime Rib Burger patties (they come 8 to a box but we just used 4)
Brie cheese
Cheddar cheese (my dad isn't really into the fancy cheeses much)
Regular bacon (perhaps using turkey bacon would be a good alternative)
Whatever burger condiments you'd like (we had lettuce, tomatoes, purple onions, avocado and your run of the mill things like mayo, ketchup, mustard etc)

Once I had the patties thawed (about 5 minutes on an auto defrost in the microwave), I put a 1 inch cube of cheese in the middle (okay, if we are being truthful, I may have gone a little bigger than that) and then molded the patty around the cheese so that no cheese was showing and patty seemed even.

Next I wrapped each burger with 4 pieces of bacon, going in a criss-cross pattern to help it all stick and to make sure the coverage of the beef was even (I think you could use turkey or chicken or even salmon for the burgers if you wanted... hm... some interesting ideas popping into my head).

Then I popped those bad boys onto a hot BBQ grill because, let's face it, everything tastes better in the summer when it's grilled!! They take longer than a regular burger to cook, so be patient and try to give the grill a coating of Pam or olive oil at the start to help with the sticking. Make sure you monitor your burgers because the fat dripping off the bacon will cause the flames to flare!!

Lastly, I laid out the condiments and built my giant tower of goodness!! The burgers were fantastic but a little tall... I think next time I will try to find a way to flatten them out a little more by spreading the cheese out instead of having a brick of cheese.

Best thing about this is that the possibilities are endless for meat and cheese combinations: blue cheese and beef, brie and turkey, cheddar and turkey, cheddar and beef, mozzarella and beef, mozzarella and chicken... endless!!!